Lizzie Borden was an American woman who was tried and acquitted for the brutal murder of her father in stepmother in Massachusetts in 1892. A gruesome grizzly double homicide by axe which would make a good story....
...unfortunately not here in The Lizzie Borden Game.
Borden has been immortalised as a folk tale and legend in America, with a rhyme which goes:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
she gave her father forty-one.
Ryan Murphy is about to feature Lizzie in Season 4 of his Netflix series "Monster" and bring Borden to a much wider audience.
Unfortunately, this film will not do any of that. Here we have a group of friends who go to stay in a secluded castle for a "Friendsgiving" weekend. One of the girls who tags along, Emily (Airisa Durand), had her parents tragically murdered years before after she played The Lizzie Borden Game. This is essentially a game of Bloody Mary/Candyman where you say the rhyme into a mirror and she appears and you have to "close the portal" before she can start causing carnage. Naturally when she was younger, she didn't and her parents died....so I am not entirely sure why she would decide it was a good time to do it again whilst on this mini-break with her friends. At no point did she want to say "actually guys, ya know, the last time I did this, my parents died a horrible death so, maybe, erm....lets just watch a film instead!".
Naturally they summon Lizzie and they all start being hacked to death one by one in gruesome ways, all of which are done by Axe, so after the second one it starts to get a little tedious, despite each death being slightly different. One guy is chopped into two, another has her face flayed off as she thrashes around before having her hand lobbed off which continues to move, another is decapitated etc etc...and its all just very mediocre.
What didn't help was the GCSE Drama Class acting which had lines delivered with pure wooden-ness. When people start getting "scared", they just seem to stare off into the distance, eyes widened, thinking it's doing the job when all it's doing is really showing off the bad acting.
Throw in a small backstory too which has the most ridiculous conclusion, leading to a laughable ending which I would have laughed at if I wasn't half-asleep from everything that had come before it.
Ryan Murphy will do the legend of Lizzie Borden justice because Director/Writer/Producer Calvin Morie McCarthy certainly didn't bring anything to the table here.
